Former NBA stars Allen Iverson and Dennis Rodman were in Cixi, Zhejiang earlier this week to scrimmage against the Beijing Ducks, which still has (the newly minted) Stephon Marbury, as part of an eight-game, multi-team tour. One Beijing player said it was a dream to play against AI. Ducks coach Min Lulei, however, had no use for such sentiment. He chided his team in the post-game press conference for not taking the opening game seriously enough, which strikes me as just silly -- the Ducks are a month removed from winning the CBA championship, and they haven't practiced together since.

Look at that thing above. Face. Palm. Yes, it’s only a clay model and not the statue itself, but how unbefitting. The pose is nondescript — he’s a thumb-tuck away from being a football referee signaling a touchdown — and it’s not as if the moment that he lifted the trophy was somehow worth memorializing... Read more »

The day after Beijing won the CBA championship, BTV hosted the official victory celebration -- the equivalent of a parade for a professional sports team in the US -- in the form of a show called 一赛季, 一生情, which I'll roughly translate as "One Season, One Lifetime of Passion."

By Jon Pastuszek It’s November 2010, and Stephon Marbury has locked himself inside a hotel room in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, sad, hurt and uncertain over his future in China. Eight months earlier, after basically being told he wasn’t welcome anymore in the NBA, he had come to play for the Shanxi Brave Dragons of the Chinese Basketball... Read more »

They kept trying to jinx it, I swear to God they did. Before tonight's game, the club gave away t-shirts (white, per Stephon Marbury's suggestion) that read, "March 30, 2012: Beijing Ducks are champions."
With 21.9 seconds left, Beijing up two and Guangdong set to inbound, the crowd chanted, "Championship! Championship!"

Jon Pastuszek over at NiuBBall has added an incredible detail in a post titled “Beijing-Guangdong Game 1: The night the CBA was at its best and worst” (first uncovered among English-language China blogs by China Sports Review): Yet the most amazing was that [Guangdong] Coach Li, a man who has won seven CBA championships, was the one... Read more »

At the 52-second mark of this Youku video, which accompanies yesterday’s post titled “Watch This Dirty, Dirty Foul On Stephon Marbury, Followed By Some Shithead Telling Him, ‘Fuck You,’” one hears a sudden crackling sound before the stream suddenly stops. It doesn’t start again until the 1:45 mark, after China national-team member Su Wei has stopped... Read more »

The CBA employs a 1-2-2-2 finals format, meaning the team with the worse record starts Game 1 at home. Theoretically it leads to longer series, but that's incumbent on the home team actually winning Game 1. Beijing, as the heavy underdogs against the four-time defending champs, was in a must-win situation on Wednesday, playing for the first time at Olympic-quality Wukesong. Embedded above and after the jump, you'll find the game in its entirety.

Youku video for those in China after the jump. [UPDATE, 3/23: Did Youku just censor my video? Embedded below is now the video on 56.com.][UPDATE 2: Well fuck, 56.com and Tudou have rejected my video as well. Hang on while I find a host that doesn't employ censors bored as shit and behaving like craven... Read more »

Stephon Marbury has had his rebirth, his redemption, and now his catharsis -- in the form of a good, long cry. In the waning moments of Sunday's Game 5, which saw Beijing oust Shanxi to claim its first CBA finals appearance in its 17-year history, cameras appeared to catch Marbury shedding a few tears on the court. But it was in the tunnels afterwards -- the bathroom, to be precise -- that he really broke down, crying "like a young child," according to the TV journalist in the next video. He then embraced his head coach. When he finally composed himself to talk to the assembled media, he said, "Man, this is the best feeling I ever had playing basketball."

Video — plus more photos (all via Sina) — after the jump. There he was at the end, the clock frozen at 15.9 seconds even though the ball had been inbounded, hugging teammate and captain Chen Lei. If this were a movie these two would have been at mid-court to soak in the moment, but no... Read more »

Some tickets for tonight’s deciding fifth game between Shanxi and Beijing are going for more than 10,000 yuan, according to CCTV’s courtside reporter. Security is at maximum. Don’t even think about taking in lighters, bottles or any miscellany that can be thrown (paraphrasing Stephon Marbury: Beijing is not Shanxi). Join us for our live-blog of the... Read more »

The above is taken from a BTV preview of tomorrow's deciding Game 5 in Beijing. Sunday's incident in Shanxi is only alluded to because everyone is already pretending it wasn't a big deal. Asked about what Beijing's fans will be like, Stephon Marbury proceeds to bumble through 12 seconds of an answer before finally giving in to the temptation to diss Shanxi's fans, albeit gently. One sort of wishes he would've just come out and said they were pieces of shit, because they sure seemed like it.

Via CCTV special about Marbury I’m sure we all remember the post-game fracas in Taiyuan, Shanxi after Sunday’s game, so we’ll jump straight to Stephon Marbury in his own words in his weekly China Daily column: I couldn’t believe this. Yes, I had experienced opposing fans throwing stuff at us before while on their home... Read more »

At the 53-second mark in the above video, the Shanxi fan who accuses Stephon Marbury of punching him in the head and then kicking him after Sunday night's game tells the journalist:
Because there were too many (Shanxi) fans, too crowded, when Marbury came out, the fans were careless so they squeezed around him. He (Marbury) had a water bottle in his hand and hit me square in the head, knocked me to the ground and kicked me in the face.

Tudou video for those in China after the jump. UPDATE: Video of accuser and Marbury’s response: “He got a wild imagination.” First, let me say as plainly and firmly as possible that the end of last night’s Beijing-Shanxi game was a joke. I’ll repeat here what I tweeted last night in apoplexy: the referees were intimidated by Shanxi’s fans and gave... Read more »

The video after the jump depicts a Stephon Marbury unlike any you’ve seen. At 35 — currently winding down his third and best season in the Chinese Basketball Association (he just scored 52 and 53 points in consecutive games in the CBA semifinals, against his former team, the Shanxi Zhongyu Brave Dragons, no less) — he’s... Read more »

The CBA All-Star game was last night in Guangzhou, with the very first minute portending an evening of heroic fails. The southern all-stars sprinted out to miss their first three shots, all three-pointers. Their first two buckets were scored by former Dallas Maverick Wang Zhizhi, whom a less discerning fan could be excused for thinking was dead. Still, the North still found itself down 11 near the end of the first quarter, ball in Stephon Marbury's hands, when the above happened.